Abstract
This is a valuable collection of systemic functional studies of language and discourse in the digital era. The intended readership, as its title suggests, is the systemic functional linguistics (SFL) community or those who at least have some background in SFL. The features discussed in the following suffice to indicate that this volume is a significant addition to the current SFL literature.
The volume distinguishes three types of SFL studies in digital contexts: (1) studies of texts that are born digital (e.g. Sindoni ‘Chapter 1’ on fandom blog; Montecino and Arancibia ‘Chapter 3’ on news editorials); (2) studies of texts that achieve digitality through en- or re-contextualisation (e.g. Fryer ‘Chapter 9’ on meaning-making by recontextualising a figure in different contexts; Morton and McCabe ‘Chapter 18’ on text digitisation); and (3) studies of texts that have digitality thrust upon them (e.g. Miller ‘Chapter 13’ on corpus-assisted appraisal research; Bayley and Bevitori’s ‘Chapter 14’ diachronic corpus investigation of meaning changes). This not only allows the editors to thematically organise the 20 studies along the three lines but also, more importantly, helps to clarify what counts as SFL studies in digital contexts.
The volume covers a wide range of topics in SFL and, as such, it achieves comprehensiveness. Topics discussed in this volume include appraisal (Petroni, Chapter 2), educational linguistics (Drury, Chapter 8), multimodality (Karagevrekis, Chapter 10), transitivity (Garcia Ríaza, Chapter 11), grammatical metaphor (Luporini, Chapter 16), discourse markers (Cummings, Chapter 17) and ellipsis (Menzel, Chapter 19). Contributors also look at different types of texts, for example tributes (Harju, Chapter 4), online newspaper comments (Cambria, Chapter 5) and hotel advertisement (Kaltenbacher, Chapter 12), which further adds merit to this volume.
The implications and applications of most studies are discussed in detail. For example, Clarke (Chapter 6), using a corpus of historical American English from 1810 to 2000, looks into present progressive forms (BE … V-ing) of mental process verbs from a diachronic perspective. His study, focusing on hear and hope, shows that the two mental verbs are diachronically being increasingly used with present progressive. Since whether a verb can be used with present progressive is one of the criteria that has been proposed by Halliday and his colleagues to distinguish the mental process from other process types (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004: 301), Clarke argues that ‘today’s grammatical distinction might not be so useful in the practice of process-type disambiguation tomorrow’ (p. 105). This suggests that corpus observations may lead us to rethink some existing theoretical hypotheses. In addition, Bloor (Chapter 7) and Shagalov and Fine (Chapter 20) offer insights into clinical linguistics research, and Drury (Chapter 8) and Karagevrekis (Chapter 10) have pedagogical applications, particularly to English for academic purposes teaching.
The volume opens up new research areas, which is particularly useful for novice researchers. Communication in the digital era becomes much easier via channels such as social network or mass media. This allows the emergence of new genres which challenge our traditional view of language as ‘spoken’ or ‘written’ because they share similarities with both colloquial speech and formal writing. Future research can, then, investigate to what extent these new genres of language in use differ from those which are traditionally viewed as spoken or written, and where such genres fit in the spoken–written continuum. Another direction worth pursuing is the employment of corpus linguistic methods in SFL studies. Research has shown that SFL can benefit from corpus investigations (e.g. Fusari, Chapter 15; Menzel, Chapter 19), which has also been emphasised by Halliday and Matthiessen (2004: 33–36). The robustness of corpus investigation techniques helps the researcher to deal relatively more easily with the linguistic data, and the explanatory power of SFL enables the researcher to account more adequately for language use in real contexts. Accordingly, it can be argued that the combination of corpus linguistics (CL) and SFL can greatly facilitate and further our investigation and understanding of language in use. However, while there have been some studies that have attempted to explore how CL and SFL can be combined in language and discourse studies (e.g. Hunston, 2013; Thompson and Hunston, 2006), it should be noted that the enterprise of developing an integrated research paradigm which is corpus-based and SFL-informed for linguistic description and explanation is still at its very beginning. This indicates that to continue and to ultimately complete this enterprise would be a worthwhile pursuit in the future.
It is then clear that, in my view, this volume comprises in many ways an excellent collection. That said, I do have one main reservation relating to the editors’ ‘Introduction’. Specifically, the volume lacks a comprehensive introduction about the theoretical underpinnings of SFL, which may restrict the scope of its readership (though as noted at the beginning, the expected readership is SFLers). It would be better if the editors had provided some background information about SFL, which can be particularly helpful for beginners of SFL and also researchers who, though outside the SFL community, are interested in SFL.
A lesser reservation relates to the occurrence of editing errors; for example, ‘Hunston 2015’ (page 5) should be ‘Hunston, 2013’, ‘BCN’ (page 18) should be ‘BNC’ and the citation of ‘Yanning 2011’ (page 263) should be ‘Yang 2011’. These of course are only minor issues which do not, and cannot, undermine the value of this volume.
Summing up, this volume is a timely publication that showcases how SFL can be applied to study new genres that have emerged in digital contexts, how qualitative interpretation of quantitative information may be usefully informed by SFL, and how SFL and corpus research can benefit from each other. As such, it is highly recommended.